Cops probe Bilal’s trail

Srinivasa Prasad/Bhargavi Kerur

BANGALORE: Adding a new twist to the ongoing investigation into Bangalore’s link with the UK terror campaign, the police are trying to find whether Bilal Abdulla, the Iraqi doctor who was one of the eight suspects arrested, visited Bangalore in 2005.

Bilal was in the blazing jeep that Kafeel Ahmed drove into the Glasgow airport terminal building on June 30.

Kafeel, an engineer from Bangalore, is undergoing treatment in a Scottish hospital after he suffered severe burn injuries in the incident while his doctor brother Sabeel is in UK police custody. The cousin Mohammed Haneef, another doctor from Bangalore, is in the custody of the Australian police.

If the police could establish that Bilal did indeed visit Bangalore before the attack on the Indian Institute of Science in December 2005, he and the Ahmed brothers could be linked to Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) that masterminded the offensive in which one professor was killed.

The LeT, it was revealed during investigations last year, planned more attacks on Bangalore’s premier science and infotech organisations.  

Evidence has already emerged in the UK that links both Bilal and Kafeel to al-Qaeda.

The police are understood to have a fake driving license issued in Bangalore in the name of one Bilal Abdulla.

Bangalore, police commissioner N Achutha Rao said: “As of now, we have no information about Bilal’s visit to the city.” The only development Rao confirmed was the seizure of a computer hard disk and CDs from the home of the Ahmed brothers in Bangalore. But he refused to divulge the contents of the disk and CDs.

The commissioner sought to give the impression that the investigations were not focused on the UK terror plot. He said that “in the wake of unconfirmed media reports about the alleged involvement” of Kafeel, Sabeel and Haneef in the terror strikes, the police here were ascertaining “whether there are links between the terror suspects and India in general and Bangalore in particular.”

The police chief also said it was still to be verified whether Pakistanis visiting India had given Kafeel’s address as their local reference. Asked whether 12 radical Muslim groups formed an umbrella National Muslim Front in 2005 to actively involve in terror-related activities in Bangalore as claimed by former joint director of the Information Bureau MK Dhar, Rao said there were no terrorist groups in the city.

Though state home minister MP Prakash said the police had “conclusive evidence” that Kafeel was the one who had driven the jeep into the Glasgow airport, the police commissioner said he was not in a position to confirm it. Prakash also spoke of evidence that pointed to Haneef’s involvement in the UK plot.

The police continued their investigation to piece together what the brothers did and who their friends and associates were during their stay in India.